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So Coffee Lake gets revealed on the 21st. This will be the thread to post all the low down on it. But in addition to that... subsequent announced Lakes that Intel has confirmed.

So unless you have been living under a rock.. you might have seen Coffee Lake leaks. These will be 6 core 12 thread mainstream flagships descending to fill the lineup and eliminate the dual core.. as rumoured. This will again be 14nm... but '14nm++' because it can do two roundhouse kicks... but also because the 14nm process has been further "refined" and along with the architecture (Kaby Lake being '14nm+').

In addition to this we have the just announced "Ice Lake" architecture... the 9th Core generation. This will be 10nm+ almost a double jump from Coffee Lake. Cannon Lake to be the first step to 10nm to iron out the bugs before Ice Lake. This is slated to be launched in 2018! Yes... 2018. It's apparently already taped out according to sources from Intel. In contrast... AMD has sent Zen for 7nm taping, though there is some conjecture over correct node naming.. check out the Icy Lake link.

So Intel seem to be throwing everything they have at AMD. Time will tell if they drown them in releases again.

Now we can post.. talk... postulate, and generally just bulldust about what is on the horizon for PC tech.

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Meet "Kaby Lake Refresh". That's no joke... Coffee Lake was not talked about but, but this Kaby Lake and it's called 8th gen. "Intel stating that they’ve made minor tweaks to the microarchitecture and manufacturing to get better performing silicon, the base frequencies are down slightly. Turbo modes are still high, ensuring a similar user experience in most computing tasks."

In addition to this Intel has changed the: "nomenclature of the integrated graphics from HD 620 to UHD 620, indicating that the silicon is suited for 4K playback and processing. During our pre-briefing it was categorically stated several times that there was no change between the two, however we have since confirmed that the new chips will come with HDMI 2.0/HDCP 2.2 support as standard, removing the need for an external LSPCON for this feature. Other than this display controller change however, it appears that these new UHD iGPUs are architecturally the same as their HD predecessors."

What might be impressive is this: "Intel is likely to have created new masks and revisions for this silicon to account for the lower power window as well as implementing HDCP 2.2 support and other minor fixes. Now by having quad-core parts in the 15W form factor, performance on the new chips is expected to excel beyond what has been available from the previous generation of Core i5-U and Core i7-U processors." - However this is an assumption and hasn't been confirmed, but if true... represents a big leap in low power performance solutions.. at least... in multitasking. It's assumed that Intel has achieved a 15% increase in IPC with this refresh... however, as you can see from this slide at launch.. it's down on clock speed.

We've seen impressive power consumption numbers from AMD Ryzen though, however in contrast, Vega seems to be an inefficient power hog, So the the competition in this notebook space will be interesting when we see it.

Now for some Bulldust:

"Even while multitasking" would seem to suggest that it can also get that it can get that much or abouts in single tasks too. However this is contradicted in another one of their own slides

25% of that performance is due to adding two extra cores. 7.5% each to architecture tweaks and manufacturing process respectively. This is also doesn't tell us if that is due to just the two extra cores, or the cores with HyperThreading... but I would give them the benefit of the doubt here and say just the cores. If you look back the previous slide though, they've had to use the legal disclaimer to say that these numbers include performance data from benchmarks that optimise for Intel procs only. This is any program made using the Intel Compiler Suite.

So what about Coffee Lake? "Intel only mentioned Coffee Lake in the context of the fact that today’s launch is not Coffee Lake. Because media were expecting this to be Coffee Lake (and expecting it to be a desktop processor launch), the question ‘is this Coffee Lake’ was actually asked several times, and the answer had to be repeated. These four new CPUs are still Kaby Lake CPUs built on the same 14+ technology, with minor updates, and bringing quad cores to 15W. So when is Coffee Lake on 14++ (or Cannon Lake) coming? Intel only stated that other members of the 8th Generation family (which contains Kaby Lake Refresh, Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake) are coming later this year. Desktop will come in the autumn, and additional products for enterprise, workstation and enthusiast notebooks will also happen. As for today's 8th Generation U-series announcement, Intel tells us that we should start seeing laptops using the new CPUs hit the market in September."

In summary, what does this mean for Coffee Lake? It looks like we can't tell much from this.. maybe we can call it half Coffee Lake, which I assume will be the code name for desktop parts. Looking at the KLR slides, I'm guessing that Baseline Performance is the 7th gen Kaby Lake parts running on 14nm+. What is unusual is their having squeezed out +7.5% performance from the same silicon process. Those design enhancements will likely transition over to Coffee Lake, and 14nm++ will likely move numbers a touch higher too. If GeekBench is anything to go by, we should see these desktop parts a touch faster than their Ryzen 6 core counterparts.

So it looks like we're not going to see much of a bump over 7th gen KL parts with the exception of multithreading. This might bode well for AMD as it seems that 14nm+ Ryzen information has gone quiet. But Zen2 7nm is happening.

8th gen Intel parts are merely a garnish on the same meal... however, final determination is reserved until they're in the hands of reviewers.

Edited August 22, 2017 by SceptreCore

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The slide further describes per-core performance increases ranging between 11-29 percent owing to higher clock-speeds and a slightly newer micro-architecture, and 51-65 percent increases in multi-threaded performance owing to the increasing core-counts across the board. While these SKUs are expected to logically replace the various Core "Kaby Lake" SKUs from their current price-points, there could be a tiny price increase, across the board, which Intel could justify using the higher core-counts.

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"Intel are dethroning the Z370, before it's even been released, and replacing it with the Z390 as the top enthusiast chipset for the Intel Coffee Lake processors... although not for some time. Thanks to a leaked Intel chipset roadmap, we have an idea of where Intel plan to go with their unprecedented multi-microarchitecture 8th Gen processors."

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Intel is reportedly preparing to bring eight cores to its mainstream desktop platform. The new processor series will be compatible with Intel Z390 chipset and could launch later in 2018.

The details come via Eurocom, a Canadian computer developer of high performance laptops and workstations. A representative of the company revealed on NotebookReview forums that they will update their Tornado F5 laptop to Intel’s brand-new Z390 chipset, supporting the 8-core, 16-thread CPUs planned to arrive in the second half of 2018.

If this is true... Intel is throwing all resources to stop AMD's Ryzen threat. But it is a rumour. Still don't know if it's going to be available on or compatible on Z370 boards, or if Coffee Lake will be compatible on Z390 boards

Edited September 18, 2017 by SceptreCore

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At the same clock speeds of 4.5GHz we can see that Coffee Lake is just a touch ahead in some games and single threaded tests than Kaby Lake, and vastly ahead in others. Then in productivity tests, it's about the same or slightly less than Sky Lake-X

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Looks troubling for Ryzen in the productivity workloads. Well... makes the 1800X further redundant, but will still boil down to price. Hopefully Zen+ can further increase the gap on Coffee Lake and keep the cat and mouse thing going.

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The 8700k is definitely an impressive CPU. It even smashes productivity workloads at 5GHz, matching an 1800X @4GHz, and sometimes besting it by loads, but that might be down to a lack of good optimization, or Ryzen's lack of IPC

Zen is definitely a server product first. AMD don't have the money to do a ring bus style interconnect, and make two different kinds of CPU's. I guess that's why they're pushing cutting edge nodes like 7nm to try and make up any difference. If they can work out how to get higher clocks, and IPC improvements on 12nm then they may be able to be close to Coffee Lake in gaming and retain that productivity advantage.

They want to hope it's good enough though, because when the cheaper CL boards arrive, then the i3's and i5's will put them back down again.